


Road Music

by epistolic



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 20:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4976014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You don’t like me,” Seungri says. “How do I make you like me?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Road Music

_It’s a road movie,_  
_a double-feature, two boys striking out across America, while desire,_  
_like a monster, crawls up out of the lake_  
_with all of us watching, with all of us wondering if these two boys will_  
_find a way to figure it out_

\--

“How do I look?”

It’s the sort of question Seungri would ask. Standing in the glum rectangle of the door-frame, bad lighting, dripping water everywhere, Jiyong is trying his best not to bleed through his newest set of bandages and Seungri is propped there with his bottle of bleach and asking how he _looks_.

The colour is so pale it’s almost white. Jiyong scowls.

“What?” Seungri says. “What? Does it look bad? Do I look bad? Was it better the way it was?”

“It’s too bright.”

Seungri looks down at the bottle in his hand, sheepish. “Guess I overdid it.”

Seungri doesn’t know what he’s doing. They’re on the run and Seungri is treating it like an excursion, a light, thrilling adventure that will finish by the end of the week with everybody a little dustier but none the worse for wear, a discovering-yourself-through-hardship story, they’re the good guys so there’s nothing to worry about. 

Of course, Seungri has no idea. Jiyong knows there’s always something to worry about.

“You’re too noticeable,” Jiyong says.

“But – it’s unexpected, right? I mean, it’s the entire opposite of how I looked before.”

“You’ll have to wear a hat.”

Seungri sighs. His shadow yawns out across the craggy carpet. “Right. Sure.”

Little boy lost, with his shoulders slumped underneath his damp shirt. Jiyong turns away from him. Even this small shift burns all along his body, his ribs a slick of fire, his breath coming short. 

“I’m gonna turn in. We need to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

There’s just one bed, cramped and narrow in the corner beside a moth-eaten chair. Seungri sits on the end of it for the longest time, with the lights out, while Jiyong battles his way towards sleep. His palm resting on Jiyong’s bare ankle. Eyes awake and glittering a little in the dark. 

Jiyong can feel the wet from where he’s oozing out onto the sheets, a bright copper tang in the air.

“It’s just a graze, for fuck’s sake,” he says finally. “Stop staring at me.”

“Sorry,” Seungri says.

“If you’re not up by five I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Seungri tickles him, just for a second, and he jolts. Then Seungri leans down and kisses where his fingers were: a soft little press of the lips, there and gone.

“Go to sleep, _hyung_ ,” Seungri says.

\--

Seungri has never felt the bite of a bullet before.

Jiyong has: numerous times. Not that any one of these times prepares you for the next. 

Jiyong’s skin is marbled with scars in all the places where Seungri is as unmarked as a fresh sheet of linen. In the space left to him Jiyong has placed scars of his own choosing – inky scribbles and slashes, a cryptic jumble of self-taught code, dates and times and the names of people who are mostly already dead. An entire history plotted like a battle-plan over his back. 

“You don’t like me,” Seungri says, that first week. “I can tell.”

Jiyong keeps driving.

They have a deadline. They are being chased across the desert. Jiyong has been shot once on this misadventure already, he’s not about to get himself shot again. 

Seungri takes little naps on the open roads, his head propped up with one hand. The dust sticks to his hair. He looks alien out here, like a character who’s wandered out of a picture book and into the wrong story, blinking in the noonday glare, getting sunburnt. 

“You don’t like me,” Seungri says. “How do I make you like me?”

Jiyong winds the window down. Fiddles with the radio.

The road falls away behind them, paring from the wheels like apple-skin.

\--

When Jiyong gets back with two cardboard cups of burnt coffee and a doughnut each, squashed and smeared inside their paper bags, Seungri is not in the car.

Seungri has shed his jacket. Left it folded neatly on his seat, like an unwrapped present. Left the car unlocked. Jiyong puts his packages on the ground, feeling the cold press of gunmetal against his hip, wants to rip great fistfuls out of the sky, wants to lie back in the dirt and scream.

Seungri is inside the servo, flirting with the waitress.

He’s wearing a cap. There are twin dimples in his cheeks. He’s pretty in the early light, his lashes sooty and fine against his skin. The girl is entranced, leaning forward to catch his lilting English, her hand twisted absently in the pocket of her apron. Caught in his orbit. In the way his body tips just slightly in towards her. In the soft little gestures of his hands, his open palms.

“Jiyong.” Seungri smiles at him. “Come meet Amy.”

Jiyong looks outside, but there’s nothing and nobody there.

Amy has a house where they can stay. Seungri tells him this, with one arm slung around Amy’s waist. Just for a night. Just until they get their breath back. 

“She knows who we are now,” Jiyong says, when they’re alone.

“Yeah, she does.”

“She might talk.”

“Nah,” Seungri says. Seungri is sprawled out on a bed that’s softer than what they’ve seen in weeks, flat on his back like a gutted fish, staring up at the ceiling. “She’s going back to her parents’ place first thing tomorrow.”

“Right.”

“It’s her sister’s birthday,” Seungri says.

Jiyong looks at him. Seungri looks fucked out. He’s loose-limbed, pliant, his white hair a spiked halo on the sheets. He smells like Amy’s cheap perfume. He hasn’t bothered to put his shirt back on, it’s lying in a tangled knot next to him on the bed. 

Something clenches low in Jiyong’s belly like a vice. He slides his pistol out from where it’s tucked beside his body, cocks it, points it at Seungri’s face.

Seungri just watches him. “Don’t shoot me, _hyung_.”

“The next time you leave the car without telling me,” Jiyong says, “I am putting a bullet into your head.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. You just looked so tired.”

“I’m not tired,” Jiyong snaps. “I’m doing my job.”

“Sorry,” Seungri repeats. He holds up his hands. “I promise I won’t do it again.”

Later, Seungri crawls into bed with him. The mattress is large enough that this is unnecessary, but Seungri is careful, doesn’t prod his wounded side, curls into his body gently, very gently. 

Seungri’s hair is still a bit damp from the shower. He smells like soap.

Jiyong falls asleep like a body pushed off a cliff.

\--

At a quarter past three he jerks awake.

Jiyong’s dreams nowadays are full of metal: it comes alive inside him, shifting underneath his skin, weighting the marrow of his bones into the earth. Bullets spit out of his body like getting shot in reverse. His stitches turn to barbed wire. Mercury sloshes, molten, inside of his eyes. His joints snap like gunshots whenever he moves, when he smiles he glows in the dark.

Seungri is tipped against him, breathing soft and regular into his neck.

He gets out of bed.

\--

Seungri cries like he’s shaking apart at the seams. Crouched in the dirty bathroom Seungri rocks back and forth with his arms wrapped around himself, great heaving sobs sticking to the grease on the walls.

“You didn’t have to,” Seungri is trying to say. “You didn’t have to.”

This is wasting time. Jiyong goes to him, snags a fist of Seungri’s ridiculous hair and yanks his head back.

“Get up,” Jiyong says.

“She was leaving anyway. She would’ve been gone, nobody would’ve – ”

“Get _up_.”

Seungri swallows. The pale, lonely bob of his throat. Unbelievably he is still crying, doesn’t seem to get tired of it, his lovely eyes swollen and rimmed with red, his face splotchy. 

He doesn’t try to get up. Just stays where he is, half on the ground and half off it. 

“She was seventeen,” Seungri says, like that makes a difference.

Jiyong clenches his teeth. “We’re not like them. We’re not people. The moment you start thinking like that, you’re in deep shit. You wanna get shot out here? You wanna die out here? They’re gonna make you dig yourself a hole in the dirt, here in the middle of nowhere, and then they’re gonna shoot you and lie you down in it. You want that? You wanna take the chance?”

Seungri doesn’t answer.

“Get up. We’re behind schedule.”

Seungri gets up. His breath still ragged. He wipes his face on the bottom of his shirt, like a child.

That night when Seungri is asleep Jiyong sits beside the bed, on the floor, his back pressed flush against the side of the mattress. The only light comes in from underneath the closed door. He has a tiny free patch on the inside of his elbow; with the end of a safety pin he etches the letters into it.

_A – M – Y._

\--

They wait until Jiyong is out of the car, out taking a leak at a petrol station by the side of the road.

There’s the shriek of rubber. Shots, and breaking glass. Jiyong comes hurtling out, pistol up already, hopes he’s not running headlong into a massacre – Seungri in the car, Seungri out of the car, Seungri’s body riddled with bullets and broken on the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.

“Seungri,” he shouts. It’s a terrible tactic. It draws too much attention. “Stay in the fucking car.”

The passenger door cranks open.

“Stay in the fucking – ”

It’s pointless. Jiyong can see him now, on the ground, bent low and trying to crawl away. Shattered glass all over him like a spill of diamonds. Jiyong moves, eyes cutting across the road, trying to cover the both of them with just one pistol. The dirt spitting up bullets all around him. He finds a billboard, then a water tank, then his shoulder is thudding into the side of the car and Seungri is dragging at him, trying to hand him something.

“You hit?” Jiyong says. He re-loads. They’ve got less than a minute before the shooters get clever and start trying to round the car. 

Seungri sounds winded. “What? Oh. No. You?”

“I told you to stay in the car.”

“Here.” Seungri tugs at him again, tries to palm a pouch into Jiyong’s pocket. “Take it.”

“Don’t fuck around. We’re both gonna make it out.”

Jiyong’s blood is singing in his ears. He sits for a moment, leaning his head back against the car’s sun-warmed flank, eyes closed, trying to still his breath.

There’s three of them, judging by the firing pattern.

“Wait,” Seungri says with sudden urgency. “Wait, don’t go out there – ”

Three isn’t nearly enough. Seungri is afraid because Seungri does not understand this. Jiyong has metal built right into him, steel and shrapnel winding into his bones. His heart is a lead heart. His body honed for survival. The killing has already been stitched into his skin. He knows how to handle a weapon because he is one.

\--

“Stop,” Seungri says, later. “Stop the car.”

Seungri gets out. He keels forward into the dry, dead grass and vomits.

Jiyong waits, and finally Seungri straightens again, swiping a sleeve across his mouth. There’s a splatter of blood across his shirt that isn’t his. There’s more of it matted into Seungri’s hair, snarled into the white like slats of clay.

“Ready?” Jiyong says.

Seungri’s arm bridges over the gearbox. His fingers skate briefly to Jiyong’s wrist.

“Yeah,” Seungri says after a while. He drops his hand. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

\--

Seungri kisses him two days later – two days of silence, barely a word out of him, and now this.

Seungri smells like salt-sweat and the leather of the car. His body is too hot, makes Jiyong want to crawl away from him if they weren’t joined at the mouth, Seungri’s tongue stabbing past his teeth without a hint of finesse. 

The desert does this, sometimes. Jiyong stays where he is, waits for the moment of insanity to be over. 

“ _Hyung_ ,” Seungri murmurs into his mouth. His palms have skated up to Jiyong’s neck. “ _Hyung._ ”

Jiyong keeps waiting. 

Seungri presses into him. Jiyong can feel where Seungri is hard against his hip. They’re taking a rest stop and the metal of the car door is blistering under Jiyong’s back. They’re out in the open and this is a bad time, a bad place, to be trying this sort of thing. Jiyong had said, I’m just gonna stretch my legs, give me a minute, then Seungri had followed him out and this is what comes of Jiyong not being careful enough. 

Jiyong lets him have the kiss but he puts a hand against Seungri’s shirt once the rutting starts. “No.”

“Please.”

“You don’t wanna do this.”

Seungri tucks his mouth into the crook of Jiyong’s neck. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Please,” Seungri says. His hips jerk, desperate, begging for contact, for anything. “Please. I can’t do this any more. I don’t care. Please, _hyung_ , I can’t do this.”

Jiyong wants to wreck him. He wants to take Seungri apart, piece by piece, then put him together again.

Instead, Jiyong moves him aside. Seungri is taller than him but Jiyong has spent his entire life shifting people out of his way. Seungri doesn’t belong here, with his soft hands and the easy way he smiles, his ribcage holding a heart that moves blood and not the iron that Jiyong is so familiar with. 

“You have a minute to sort yourself out,” Jiyong says. “Then we have to go.”

“I like you,” Seungri says.

“No,” Jiyong says. He gets back into the car. “You don’t.”

\--

It’s mostly healed now, a raw pink slash against the side of Jiyong’s ribs.

Jiyong’s hair is getting long. He stands shirtless in front of the tiny, cracked mirror. His hair is still wet from the bath. He takes random handfuls of it and hacks at it, quietly, patiently, with his switchblade. 

Seungri is watching him from the bathroom door.

Their eyes meet for a second in the glass. Jiyong’s hand is poised, the blade glinting. 

Seungri’s stare shivers down his spine like a physical touch. Jiyong is the one to break away first, turning back to his own reflection and the trickle of water down his collarbones, _V – I – N – C – E – N – T_ crawling up his throat, _Y – O – U – N – G – B – A – E_ nestled close against his shoulder, the way his eyes are like boarded-up windows even to himself, giving nothing away. 

When he looks back over, Seungri is gone.

\--

“I have to go out,” Seungri tells him.

Seungri is dressed for it already: clean jeans, a shirt that has somehow managed to stay white despite all of this, slight smudge of liner around his eyes, silver in his ear. 

“It’s going to storm tonight.” Jiyong is flicking through the television channels, hunting for the news.

“I don’t mind.”

The correct answer is, _It’s too dangerous. Tomorrow you’ll just slow us down._ But there are bruises beneath Seungri’s eyes and he looks like _he’s_ the one who took the bullet, like he’s lost blood, all the colour washed out of him, his wrists so narrow and white.

“Don’t get into trouble,” Jiyong says.

Later, Jiyong falls asleep to the sound of the storm. Thunder drums up through the floor and into his bones. His parents died on a night like this, lightning like a grenade-flash, the blanketing water, the rain punching into your skin if you got outside, the wind like the howl of a wounded animal. The scream of tires, and then, the road. The crunch of asphalt. The hard sound of snapping bones. 

He wakes to Seungri on top of him, Seungri’s teeth set into his throat.

Seungri is drunk. He’s also soaking wet. His jeans are plastered to Jiyong’s legs. His body is warm, insistent, his weight pinning Jiyong down. His mouth moves clumsily, kissing and biting in a messy trail to Jiyong’s jawline; his hands don’t seem to know what to do.

“Seungri,” Jiyong starts to say.

“Don’t,” Seungri is saying, over and over. “Please, please, don’t.”

Seungri fits his hand over Jiyong’s ribs. It’s a glancing touch, palm against ratcheting heartbeat; Jiyong’s eyes squeeze shut but Seungri is on and all around him, relentless, clutching to his body like they’re drowning.

“I want you,” Seungri says against his mouth. 

“You shouldn’t.”

“But I do.”

Seungri kisses him.

So Jiyong flips the two of them over. Jiyong is not a good person, never has been, can only contain himself inside the cage of his skin for so long before it comes screaming out. He puts his hands underneath Seungri’s shirt, blood and bone and sweat and the desperate strain of muscle. He gets the belt off. He bites at Seungri’s ear. He should be terrifying but Seungri is watching him like he’s a house on fire, like he’s the moon, an eclipse, a hailstorm, a train-wreck in slow motion, like he’s anything but the cold starved creature that he is, like he’s actually something beautiful.

\--

They get dressed in the milky start of dawn on opposite sides of the room.

Seungri’s hair stands in tufts all over his head. He moves as if he’s underwater – slow, eyes heavy with sleep, the muscles of his jaw slack and vulnerable. He yawns and it’s a darting little cat-yawn, all pink tongue and very white teeth.

Jiyong tosses a cap at him. “Put it on. Let’s get moving.”

“Okay, _hyung_.”

It’s a very bright day. The sky a blue so boneless you could fall into it. Seungri bumps against him as they head towards the car, a drowsy, artless knock of their bodies. 

They don’t talk about it. The desert swallows them up as they drive.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh god I can't seem to stop writing miserable AUs. I'm so sorry. That said, I wrote this fic listening to Seungri's _Gotta Talk To U_ on repeat for like five hours, so I can't be held responsible. The next one will be happier and it'll be canon, I promise. I am also sort-of contemplating writing a sequel to this? A part of me thinks it feels unfinished, a part of me thinks it's perfect the way it is. Let me know what you guys think?
> 
> For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


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